Author: Dave J.

I’m sure this kind of thing must happen at larger companies, but I don’t remember ever hearing about such a thing before.

A what, you ask? A Supplier Conference. From the customer’s email:

Please join us as we review our 2008 successes and our plans for 2009. Spend the day with our executive, purchasing, engineering, and manufacturing teams to discuss how together we can achieve world-class pricing, quality, and collaboration. In focused breakout sessions, we will discuss XXX projects to help you better align your product and service offerings with our needs.

It makes perfect sense. Make your vendors partners. Give them a chance to schmooz with your staff. Let them talk to each other, too.

Have I been working under a rock to not have seen such a thing before?

(Imagine the vendor chatter at such an event where the customer practices reverse-auctions and other cost-down activities. LOL.)

Everyone should know I’m a fanboy of Seth, to the point of referring to him by only his first name, and not bothering with a link, assuming you MUST also be reading him.

But Seth is far from perfect.

So Murray points out at his sage blog, View From The Corner Office, titled: The Marketer Perfected:

“In a recent post, The Marketer’s Attitude, Godin describes the perfect marketer. It would be a high energy, relentlessly positive person. It would be someone self-motivated and self-sufficient, able not only to visualize complex projects but also to carry them through to fruition. He or she could engage strangers and embrace ambiguity. He sees the down streams and the downsides of any plan and adjusts accordingly. And so on.”

Yes, I read that post by Seth at least twice, seeing if I could mentally measure myself up to his ideal. I can’t say that I felt I was. But in B2B, you have to be more pragmatic. Murray, from the vantage of retired marketer/sales VP saw the hole in the perfection:

“There was something missing from his description, however. The perfect marketer must also be the perfect politician. The astute marketer knows that, in a perfect world, all things are possible. But in a highly volatile world, where people see their investments and imagine their lives going down the rabbit hole, where Boards are insecure and CEOs intractable and budget cuts inescapable, not all things are possible. Indeed, most things – even the small things and especially the right things – require a great deal of personal conviction and much cleverness to gain the collaboration of those in high places if projects are to ever see the light of day.”

Now, Murray is not the first to pick on Seth. But in this case, he adds value. Because without conquering the politics, your ideas remain just that–yours.

(Hmmm. Looks like I’ve given Murray the same one-name treatment. Completely unplanned, honest.)

1. Yes, I joined Twitter. 2. I don’t hold it too highly, but 3. it is a place I can quickly dump my experience of life.

Check my ‘tweets’ here: https://twitter.com/b2btw or in the side-bar of this blog.

PS: Damn thing won’t let me upload my add-book to see if anyone I know is there easily.
PPS: Should I join Facebook next?
PPPS: Good thoughts on Twitter’s usefulness
PPPPS: Notice how someone beat me to the b2blog handle. Damn!
PPPPPS: This blog-post is way too long for Twitter.

We’re doing a bit of database management today. Cleaning up lists, correcting bad data, etc.

So this post at J-Walk Blog got me thinking:

Threatened Over A Penny

In Massachusetts: City threatens blind woman over unpaid 1-cent bill.

A 74-year-old blind woman was shocked when her daughter found a letter from the city saying a lien would be placed on her home unless she paid an overdue water bill.

The amount? 1 cent.

Eileen Wilbur told The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro the letter sent her blood pressure soaring, and pointed out that stamps cost 42 cents.

City Collector Debora Marcoccio said the letter was among 2,000 sent out. A computer automatically prints letters for accounts with an overdue balance, and they are not reviewed by staff before being mailed, she said.

Note: The penny shown here is not the actually penny that she owes. It’s just a random penny. However, it could be used to pay the bill.

When you’ve got a long list of data, there is data that gets overlooked, and even the data that you know is wrong, but doesn’t seem worth fixing.

Do you fix it? Do you look for errors? Do you even know that the errors might exist?

Here’s an example: We divide our territories via area codes. This is done automatically by our CRM software. It was a challenge to keep up with new area codes over the years, but now we have a new problem:

We have prospects using cell phones issued from other regions. We can manually fix these as they are entered, but when we do sweeping data activities, and territory re-alignments, they may get assigned incorrectly.

What a pain in the neck!

UPDATE (12/11/08): This active wish list is useful for seeing the limitations of Google Sites.

When Google ‘Sites’ launched earlier this year, I shrugged my shoulders.

Now I’m jumping up and down!

In just an hour or so, I’ve just created a project-management intranet using Sites, and I’m floored by how easy and useful it is!

I’ve created two issue-tracking pages, a blog/discussion, a recent activity page, and file storage.

Well, that’s all that you can do with the existing page templates, but that’s all I needed. (Of course you can just create a page from scratch, too.) The tracking/to-do lists tool is great! Organization is pretty easy, at least for the few pages I made.

Because it is part of our Google Apps account, it is easy to share this project across the company. That maybe the hardest part of Sites, which is getting others to join in and use my content and add their own.

I’ll have to throw all my basic marketing to-dos and projects on Sites next. Fun … and organized. Yay!

Long-time readers will know I hate candy bowls at trade shows. I mean, really, are you that lazy?

I saw a lot of candy bowls last week. Even really pretty bowls were filled with, tops, $5 in candy. And to the guy with a bowl filled to the brim with peanuts … what the heck?

A star is given away
Okay, after I spent thousands for booth space, I invested some more money in promos at the booth.

How about a nice squishy star stress-ball? I was completely floored by how popular those were.

The bright yellow color drew people over, and the tactile desire to squeeze them got them grabbing. Seth might say it was an opportunity to delight.

Even better, we marked some on the back, so folks might get a better item. Yes, that cost even more money. But it gave the sales reps a chance to engage visitors to see if they ‘won’.

And when the show got slow on Friday, the reps actually tried to see how many of the stars they could give away. Beats standing around chatting on a cell-phone?

Compare that to the guys with the candy-bowls who had to simply look up from their laptops and smile and passersby grabbing candy from their bowls. I say their bowls should have been filled with suckers. 😉

I’m at a show this week. Its a whole different world for a couple days.

Here’s a fun little ditty from Jason Stewart of DemandBlog about going to shows/events:

Events time is here
Giveaways and gear
Fun for all
But marketers call
Their hardest time of year…

I’ll have to think of my own verse later.

In an email discussion with a sister company about SEO, I was told that the Wikipedia page for our type of product was deleted.

Deleted. Gone. Wiped clean. Trashed.

I didn’t create the page. I didn’t contribute. There was no mention of my company or link. It wasn’t a very detailed or valuable page. But it is just disappointing to see a page that defines what I do for a living tossed away.

The page was deleted on October 3 by a moderator with this claim: (Speedy deleted per (CSD G11), was blatant advertising, used only to promote someone or something.(TW)).

As of Google’s last cache of the page only four days earlier, there were NO links or mention of any manufacturers. The cached page did have these warnings at the top:

• Please wikify this article or section.
• This article needs additional citations for verification.
• Please help improve this article by adding reliable references.
• This article contains weasel words
• This article is written like a personal reflection or essay

Now, I remember that our #1 competitor had a few links to reference guides and articles at an earlier time in the Wikipedia entry, but those were gone, so someone must have edited or tried to comply with an advertising warning.

Maybe an editor and a competitor of mine got into an edit war that ended with the deletion. I can only guess.

In any case, it is just plain disappointing. And it makes me leery of contributing to the page once it is resurrected. Social media -bah!

From a trade show I’ll be going to later this month:

“Dear Exhibitor

It has come to our attention that there is an organization based in Mexico that is claiming to be associated to our exhibition XXXX. We understand that they are selling advertisements to our exhibitors on the basis that they are in some way affiliated to us. This is not the case.

The company is called Expo-Guide and they are NOT associated with us or any of our exhibitions.”

Is it a scam or just independent publishing?

All trade shows, seminars, and conferences seem to go by acronyms.

How about a new one called TECAF?

TECAF is a conference put on by PHOTON, a solar industry trade publication.

“To put it less politely: If the above scenario plays out through 2012, one-third of annual global generating capacity additions will come from solar. The traditional electricity industry is simply unprepared for this scenario, and if it proves true, many Traditional Electricity Companies Are F*&$#d (TECAF). “

F*&$#d ???

Sounds like a new brash industry is taking off. With the current bleakness, I welcome the positive attitude!